“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
Also instead of Neo Jesus, when he kills the squiddies outside of the matrix, that should’ve been because they were still in there but Zion and co didn’t realise there was another layer to go.
Instead we got Revolutions.
This is what I thought was going to happen at the end of 2 and was so excited I had to watch 3 right away. I was disappointed.
Disagree, the “another layer” thing would be extremely lazy writing.
Depends on how it’s done. What little EU there was for The Matrix does have it as a thing that a small percentage of redpills go crazy, thinking that Zion is just another layer of the matrix. The Oracle being another part of the system of control would also be on brand for the machines and would work well with the Architect’s bit about how if he’s the father of the matrix then she is its mother.
I kinda just assumed that was how it was meant to be interpreted and the other stuff was just crappy writing. The mention that Zion had been destroyed multiple times kinda implied it was just another matrix.
Unless… there is always another layer because different people require different illusions… and therefore there is no escape from the Matrix…
Disagree, the “another layer” thing would be extremely lazy writing.
And “Neo has actual superpowers for no reason” wasn’t?
What do you mean “no reason”? IMO it was executed and explained well.
Neo having super powers in the matrix was explained. Not how he had them in “real life”.
It was because he’s connected to the machine network and he has some limited interfacing with them. He could trigger their destroy sequence or whatever.
At least that’s what I remember, haven’t seen it for a while.
It’s easier to explain, he had WiFi connection to the matrix/machines.
Man that does work so much better…
That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.
Humans are great computers, we’re just not digital. Our brains are definitely analogue computers, where closer neurons or stronger synapse connections can mean higher voltage signals from one cell to another. This is a very powerful and nuanced form of computing. It’s not great for exact calculation of numbers, but it is great for interpreting data, even extremely large data sets. Human brains (many animal brains really) are also really fantastic at image processing in particular.
If it’s worthwhile to have a dedicated video card in your pc, then likewise, it would probably be worthwhile to have human brains in your evil robot hivemind. It would make some kids of processing much more efficient.
Human brains are excellent at computing certain things that are almost impossible for a regular computer. Having worked for years on computer vision I can tell you how hard it is to make computers realize simple stuff, heck, you need massive server farms just to do a basic object recognition that any 3 years old can already do. Sure, you can train a simple AI to recognize some objects, but it will never (currently) be as many objects or as precise as a person can instantly recognize.
The truth is human brains are excellent at what they evolved to do, i.e. pattern recognition. So much so that when trying to figure out data it’s usually easier to plot the data in many different ways to see if something shows up. In fact usually when you try to do cluster analysis the first machine result is, let’s say not great, but you can see that things are wrong and adjust the parameters.
As for your other point your brain does this automatically, they can just put a billboard with the thing they want analyzed and your brain (and millions of others) will give them the answer. Or they could use our dreams, even during sleep our brains are still active, and they could run any scenarios then. There are many other ideas, e.g. people playing videogames inside the matrix are actually controlling robots, or people working in forklifts are actually piloting construction robots in the real world, etc.
The original CPU idea was excellent, but computers weren’t so ubiquitous back then, and the producers thought that the audience wouldn’t understand it.
Humans solving CAPTCHA for the machines
Well, they could co-opt our brains in various ways.
That asinine stuff at an office? Maybe it’s work the computers weren’t good at.
Doing manual labor? Maybe it’s controlling some robot doing a real world analog.
Some unskippable ad that you passively thought about? Maybe it represented work being done.
Maybe it is intruding on “spare” brainpower and if the balance glitches in some weird way? Reset you with “just a dream”.
I think there’s enough room for a “wetware” computing explanation. However I could see it being more than audiences were really prepared to think through. I think your “we need the humans safely out of the way of harming us, but we don’t hate them and we’ll keep them alive and engaged in a safe way” probably would have worked well, but they wanted the AIs to be cartoonishly bad in the first movie, and that would have been “too nice”.
The best way to have it would be that there was a directive that they couldn’t kill humans. Of course you need to deal with the issue of the agents taking bodies over and then getting them killed. But the matrix never made much sense in that regard anyway since neo and co killed so many innocent people it’s ridiculous.
I’ve seen this posted a few times but I could never find a source. I think this is just what people want to believe!
Here’s a source: https://web.archive.org/web/20211007003509/https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/q2xefs/batteries_not_processors/
Bottom line, original is batteries
I love the explanation. “Human body heat combined with a firm of fusion generates electricity.”
So they have Fusion, and yet they’re relying on body heat. Yeah, makes a lot of sense everyone knows the human body is several hundred thousand degrees.
What was the reason for the change?
The execs thought audiences wouldn’t understand using human brains for processing power.
Same kind of change was made in the Three Body Problem series. Instead of the cosmic microwave background radiation flickering for a character who is viewing it through a device, all the stars in the night sky flickered for all of humanity. Lots of yadda yaddaing the science as well in that show.
I, uh… Okay? Admittedly I was already using PCs at the time that movie came out, but I feel that’s still easier to understand than using humans as batteries. I think both concepts are somewhat abstract but the brain as a bio processor is still something I can grasp more easily than trying to think of where exactly we even store out “energy” and how they’d use that. I would’ve been curious how normies from that time period would’ve seen this though.
Yeah, when the story got out (true or not) a few years after release the general consensus was that it was a bad call.
Probably also a matter of agency. Being used as a battery where you’re still in control of your mind goes over better than “we’re gonna hijack this persons mind and constantly make use of it”. It also then makes things like agents taking over people in the matrix or Smith getting out that much more impactful.
From my view, I feel it would’ve kinda made more sense in explaining the Matrix itself even. If it was computed by our brains, then a good portion of how we perceive it would likely just be part of our own brain processes. Like a dream. It’s often weird but when we’re dreaming we usually don’t perceive it as weird. They wouldn’t have to recreate a complete digital simulation, they just would have to hook up into our brains and let it do the world building.
Using brainpower to power the matrix makes sense, but it sounded like OP was initially just saying for spare computing period, whether for the matrix or anything else even if it wasn’t related.
“Using their spare brainpower” sounds more like them using the remaining parts of someone’s brain that is not used for whatever they do use to run their consciousness within the Matrix.
I guess they’ve never hard of the borg…
I thought this was partially coveref when neo asks for a physics book, and they tell him one doesn’t exist.
A little bit more emphasis during Star Wars that Vader wanted the Storm Troopers to aim poorly and let them get away. It would have solved decades of jokes and arguments about Storm Trooper weapon accuracy.
It was right there all along:
Grand Moff Tarkin : Are they away?
Darth Vader : They’ve just made the jump into hyperspace.
Grand Moff Tarkin : You’re sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I’m taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.
Evidently most of the fandom needs to have it beaten over their heads a bit more blatantly than that.
Another thing that would have been helpful is if it was made clearer just how monstrous the Ewoks actually are. There wouldn’t be as much shame to the Imperials for losing against them if people had only internalized a bit better that:
- Ewoks are strong enough that they can haul Redwood-sized logs up into the canopy to build deadfalls, using only crude vine ropes and muscles, and do it quietly enough that the nearby Imperial garrison didn’t notice.
- They are stealthy enough that an ordinary hunting party can sneak up on an elite Rebel strike force (including a Jedi).
- That hunting party was hunting a 3-meter-tall boar-wolf, by the way. Ewoks hunt these routinely.
- Endor is full of predators like that, and despite that the Ewoks let their children wander the forest on their own. Upon being confronted with an armor-clad alien wielding a blaster weapon and riding a flying machine, one of those lone children thought to himself: “guess I’d better kill him.” Leia helped, of course, but the Ewok couldn’t have known she would.
- One of their literal gods, personified in the form of a physical avatar before them, ordered the Ewoks not to burn some people alive and devour their flesh. The Ewoks hesitated for half a second and then resumed piling the firewood with a jaunty song. Gods are spiffy and all, but don’t get in between Ewoks and their cannibalism.
Is it cannibalism? It feels more like a (talking) bear eating a human.
I do feel like the Stormtooper point got lost on Lucas too by RotJ honestly. In Empire they do pretty good except when they’re, again, explicitly trying to lure the hero into a trap. RotJ has the most weirdness of the originals and probably the most EU ‘redemptions’/revisions. With stuff like “here’s what was really up with the Ewoks”, Boba not dying, etc.
“Long pig”
Replace some of the stormtroopers in ROTJ with regular army forces and it might have helped the stormtroopers’ reputation.
Conversely: Stop overthinking Star Wars. I get that people love the universe but the movies are straight up just not deep at all.
They are stealthy enough that an ordinary hunting party can sneak up on an elite Rebel strike force (including a Jedi).
Are we really pretending George was thinking about this while making Jedi? Like in a script review some young guy pipes up: Hey George, how do the Ewoks sneak up on Luke when he has force powers? And George calmly explains, “Well son, Ewoks may look cute but they are actually deadly hunters with expert tracking and stealth skills”
The Ewoks win against the empire because the script says they do. It looks stupid because they are children/(dwarves?) in costumes who can probably barely see what’s going on.
I know I’m being a major grump but reading these comments make my eyes roll out of my sockets. It’s like watching art critics fawn over an 8 year old’s painting because they’ve been told it’s a picasso.
I say all this as someone who enjoys the OT but finds it increasingly embarrassing to admit to having any interest in the property.
Overthinking is the best kind of thinking.
Are we really pretending George was thinking about this while making Jedi?
No. I’m a proponent of the death of the author school of literary analysis. I don’t care what George Lucas was thinking. Indeed, he’s shown himself to not be the best at figuring this sort of stuff out.
What I’m doing here is having fun. I’m taking a work of fiction and seeing how far I can run with it. You, on the other hand, are feeling embarrassed about having fun and avoiding it. There’s a famous quote by CS Lewis that I think is apt here.
I was anticipating this response and you’re entirely correct. I’m happy you enjoy thinking about Star Wars lore and I shouldn’t be shaming anyone for having fun. I shouldn’t feel embarrassed and I understand that that is a character flaw and something I should work on.
Aside from that, there is this feeling of confusion and frustration that I think has some validity, but which doesn’t necessarily justify me being a dick online about it. I think my frustration is that Star Wars has a specific meaning to me which is very different from what it has become today, and it’s frustrating watching the “original meaning” get washed away in a sea of merch and fan theories. I know it’s stupid to hold a specific interpretation as the correct one and try to force that on others, but I hope you can at least empathize with the feeling of watching something you like morph into something completely unrecognizable.
To me, Star Wars is trilogy of corny action adventure movies with a cast of quirky characters set in a fantastical but ultimately very shallow universe. A trilogy that revolutionized the VFX industry and brought fantasy into the mainstream. I feel alone in viewing the ip this way, I feel alone in thinking Rogue One was a boring lifeless husk of a movie that no epic battle scenes could redeem.
I assume take pleasure in sharing your love of Star Wars fan with other fans and that’s more or less what I’m after I think. I’m sorry for being a dick about it.
I know it’s stupid to hold a specific interpretation as the correct one and try to force that on others, but I hope you can at least empathize with the feeling of watching something you like morph into something completely unrecognizable.
Oh, we can certainly agree about that sort of feeling. I am very much not a fan of the Disney sequel trilogy, for example, and seeing them enthuse about how it’s all part of the “Skywalker Saga” and how Rey is the true “chosen one” and all that rot is just awful. But still, the “let’s see if I can make it make sense” part of me has still had some fun with trying to fix up even small bits of that pile of wreckage.
I’m not even a fan of the prequel trilogy, despite the retroactive “redemption arc” they seem to have received in recent years. I think they’re still pretty bad, they just got a coat of polish in the form of the Clone Wars and a “this is what bad really is” comparison to stand next to in the form of the sequel trilogy.
set in a fantastical but ultimately very shallow universe
Shallow puddles are still fun to splash around in. :) Sometimes the shallowness actually gives me more flexibility and fun in theory-crafting about it.
Anyway, there’s room for all sorts of fans, and I’m sorry that you’re feeling alone. I’m sure there’s others out there that share your view, it’s probably just a bit hard seeing them with the current amount of activity from the other kinds of fans.
“Not to mention how many troopers we lost under orders to not shoot to hit.”
Actually that raises another point. It is really unclear in the first film what exactly Vader’s position of authority is. Because he seems kind of subordinate to Tarkin at points. He even tells Vader to leave that officer alone when he’s strangling him, and he obeys the order.
I think Lucas thought he had it covered with Obi-Wan’s, “These blast points are too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are that accurate” line. You are correct though, that is one change that was needed.
What? Never heard that. Why?
Because Luke is his son and he still cares about him. He just tries to hide it from the emperor and in the end has to kill him to save Luke.
The problem is the audience only ever finds this out in the final movie so it doesn’t make a lot of sense in the first two films. I’m not sure if there was a good way to address this though because the only option would have been to have a scene where Vader basically explains all this to Luke. It seems a bit late in the story for it really to be relevant.
Vader didn’t know Luke was his son until episode 2. They let them escape so they could track them back to the rebel base.
What? I’m pretty sure they do it so they can track them back to the rebel base.
So that they can track the ship back to the rebel base!
That makes sense.
“So, we started using teleportation now.”
- Everyone in Game of Thrones from season 6 onward.
Did you just win the thread? I think you just won the thread.
Your comment’s weird, but not downvote level weird? Certainly not more downvotes than upvotes level weird… are people reading this comment in different ways?
Ha! How about that. I didn’t even know my dumb joke was getting downvotes. Either we’ve got some people who really prefer other responses, or we found the last bastion of late-season GoT fans on the internet.
It’s a bit Reddit-y, that’s probably why.
It’s probably just a “this comment could have been an upvote” situation.
I wouldn’t think about it too much. People downvote for the strangest reasons. Also OP doesn’t care and didn’t even notice. Which is the best take on votes I think.
I was just pointing out an extra oddity tbh. I dont particularly care myself as well
Matt Smith’s character in HOTD is actually The Eleventh Doctor, during his several hundred year run off screen. He spends much of GoT working to remember where he left the TARDIS, so that he could ferry the plot along in S6+
I kinda think that if you can imagine a one-line fix to a plot hole, it isn’t really a plot hole.
I remember someone insisting to me that there was this huge plot hole in the film of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Merry and Pippin don’t get told about what Frodo and Sam are actually doing until the Council of Elrond, but still willingly run around risking life and limb to help them. Now, not only is this not a plot hole in itself (I’m pretty sure I’d help anyone fleeing a demonic horseman, just on principle, never mind if that person was my lifelong friend/cousin), it’s also quite obvious that they could have been told everything offscreen. The audience didn’t need to hear all that explanation again, five minutes after we first heard it.
A lot of plot holes people like to complain about are basically of this nature. ‘Can you imagine a fix?’ Yep, easily. ‘Did the audience need to hear it?’ Nope, because I could easily imagine it. ‘Well, there you go, then.’
Yeah, 90% of the time someone says pothole and I hear “The story didn’t spoon feed me the answer and I’m inexplicably mad about it.”
In another thread just today I was pointing out that this is the result of the Cinema Sins school of criticism taking over the average person’s relationship with media. People seem to genuinely think that how good or bad something is comes down to tallying up “plot holes” to come up with a sin score and calling it a day.
Plot holes are fine. Even legitimate plot holes are fine; if a story actually captures your attention and holds your emotional engagement, you won’t be thinking about plot holes because you’ll be too busy enjoying the story. This is Hitchcock described as Fridge Logic; problems that only occur to you hours after the movie is over and you’re staring into the refrigerator trying to decide what snack to make (yes, that’s the actual origin of the term). And he was very much of the opinion that this was absolutely fine; as long as any apparent inconsistency wasn’t so egregious as to break suspension of disbelief right there in the moment, it could be safely ignored.
When people fixate on minor plot holes it’s either because a) fundamentally the story sucks, so their mind is wandering, or b) they’ve trained themselves to constantly find or invent logic holes instead of actually trying to engage with what the storytelling is doing.
I’m digging deep in my memory here so I can’t provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey’s Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, “wait, did they ever solve this episode’s medical mystery?” There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there’s a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn’t the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I’m still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.
I haven’t watched any Grey’s Anatomy to speak of, but I suppose that sounds about right from what I’ve heard.
I haven’t watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it’s aged (or how my tastes have changed as I’ve aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray’s Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn’t a shonen power fantasy, you can’t just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.
For instance, in a very early season there’s a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of “didn’t we go through this already?”
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
Yeah, my wife wanted to watch it together and we got burned out on the repeated catastrophes. At some point they move onto dramatic plot disasters that include a bunch of the hospital staff, to make it more exciting. The show went on for a ton of seasons after we dropped it, so presumably they found some way to make it even more dramatic than a disaster that kills a 3rd of the hospital every season finale.
Watching the show on netflix was also bad for emotional whiplash. They would build all season up to two doctors confessing their love in the season finale, and then immediately in the next episode (new season) they would be broken up again. I suspect it felt more natural with the delay between seasons in-between episodes, but watching them back to back like that felt jarring.
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
Looks like it has eroded significantly over time, but I guess with a sticky core audience and a shrinking expectations for network TV, it’s got its niche.
While I haven’t seen it personally from what I can recall. There apparently exists an episode of Midsomer Murders where the motiv of the killings got cut before airing.
Fun to hear Gray’s also managed to do that blunder. Wonder if any other similar shows have do the same. Feels kinda easy to accidentally do in that type of shows, if you do a very character focused episode.
There’s an episode in House where they do that. But it turns out that it’s all just Houses imagination anyway, and so that makes sense because really everything is about him. So it makes sense that nobody cures the patient if he isn’t there.
The Kessel Run being measured in distance rather than time could have been solved with a closeup shot instead of wide angle.
The way it’s scripted, Han thinks he’s got two local yokels and is feeding them a line. Obi-Wan, of course, is not a yokel, and reacts to that info with a “come on, dude” kind of look. Alec Guinness does do it, but not in a noticeable way. If there was a closeup shot, it would have worked. The wider shot that went into the film makes his reaction barely noticeable.
This leads to decades of treating Han’s line as actual truth and trying to figure out what he meant. Legends and Disney canon provided basically the same answer. Kessel is surrounded by black holes, and skimming closer to the event horizon would mean taking a shorter distance. Wasn’t supposed to work that way, though.
It mostly always just bothered me that a parsec is a unit of distance that relies on the Earth’s specific orbital distance around the sun. The Faraway Galaxy of Star Wars would have no way to measure how far a parsec is.
Star Wars does that. Han mentions “I’ll see you in hell” just before running off to find Luke on Hoth, and now there’s a whole Wookiepedia entry on what “hell” is in that galaxy.
“If we can’t get the shield generator fixed, we’ll be sitting ducks.”
And now there’s a Wookieepedia entry for “duck”.
In the Phasma book there’s a stormtrooper with red armor named Cardinal “like the bird”. I wanted to throw the book across the room when I read that but I was reading it on my tablet so I restrained myself.
There was a Star Wars novel where the author liked using the phrase “Soandso looked at Sosandso like he’d turned into a huge spider.”
I can track that though. Almost every culture on Earth has a concept of “The Bad Place” that it’s possible to go after you die. I have always been meaning to check and see if the race that Luke Skywalker is, is referred to as human in canon, and if Canon has anything to say about why they look exactly like us. I suppose I could look for myself on Wookiepedia, but I know as soon as I open that website, I’m not getting anything else done today.
Han sarcastically calls Jabba “a wonderful human being” in the special editions of ANH
That’s right. I forgot about that.
The fact that the character he said it to originally was a human makes it even better.
They’re human. I don’t think it’s been fully covered how this happened, but there was one interesting piece that didn’t get published.
It combines Lucas’ various other movies like THX-1138 and Indiana Jones. Earth is overrun with an AI-driven society in THX, and a group of humans get on a ship to escape. They fall through a wormhole and end up in the Star Wars universe, becoming the first humans there. Han and Chewie travel back through this wormhole, and crash land on Earth in a forest. Chewie survives, and him walking around starts a bunch of stories about Big Foot. Indiana Jones investigates, finds the remains of the Falcon and Han, and wonders why this guy looks familiar.
I think American Gothic was in there somehow, too.
Even if it did get published, I can’t imagine it being taken seriously as Legends canon. Chewie was already killed off in the Yuuzhan Vong stuff with Han surviving. But that’s the closest to an answer we ever got.
As it stands, Courscant is often believed to be the original human homeworld in-universe, and whatever the truth is has been lost to time. Star Wars is interesting with how old the universe feels–which is more of a Tolkein-like property than traditional science fiction–and this is a pretty good example.
Chewie died?
Yup. Chewie died in the novels, but Han did in the movies. Go figure.
So what you’re saying is variant Star wars characters is going to be a thing?
Disney owned the property now so it’s totally possible for the TVA to show up at some point. They may as well, It might actually make Star wars good again.
That’s cool. Thanks. I haven’t read almost any of the expanded universe stuff, but at some point I’m going to have to delve into it. My favorite part though, is the fact that a large percentage of Star wars fans, are also both professional and casual science nerds, so there are officially accepted orbital periods, and gravitational constants for basically every single planet.
The silly thing is that they feel a need to justify it. They’re speaking English, every single word they say carries an incredible history of the world we live in from Rome to the speakers of Old Norse and otherwise. The simplest solution is a handwave: the creators translated everything out of Galactic Basic for you.
but speaking English is fine …
I had a friend who was really annoyed that there was a Scottish accent in Force Awakens. I said that none of the characters are speaking English in-universe, so any and all accents are just analogies for how each character is heard. Nope. He was still annoyed because there’s no Scotland in the star wars galaxy.
Extra weird hang-up to have, because the films have always had English and American accents side-by-side, even though there’s clearly no England or America!
Anyway, it’s really no different to them calling their ships X-wings and Y-wings, even though they don’t use our alphabet.
Shit that x-wing thing is really gonna bug me now.
Sorry!
In the original cut they did use the Latin alphabet, so this is, incredibly, yet another thing George Lucas did to make the first film retroactively annoying.
Nah dw about it, it is quite funny.
I never considered the X and Y thing! Yirt looks kind of like a V, but Vev looks like a Y, so the shape at least exists, but Xesh looks like a triangle, so no go there!
Since the franchise is not afraid to sometimes have other languages spoken instead of absolutely everyone speaking English, it’s reasonable to assume that the Basic they’re speaking does indeed sound exactly as we hear it, accents and all.
There are plenty of films where the language is translated to English for the audience, and then a third language is spoken by characters to show that the characters using the primary language wouldn’t understand them.
I think basic would sound different from english, and then when we see characters speak in a different language it’s to show that they are multi lingual and can speak in a way that other characters wouldn’t be able to understand.
True, but since the Aurabesh seen in the background is just a different alphabet used to write English, it’s a given that Basic is English.
Again, plenty of films/TV just use substitution ciphers for alien languages that are definitely not english in canon. Stargate Atlantis has Ancient text that can be deciphered into english letters, but that’s just an easter egg for the fans.
If the story is translating the spoken language for the benefit of the audience, there’s no reason text can’t have the same justification.
No, no, they’re speaking Basic!
Yes it does. I’m given to understand that they also translate the film into the primary language of the region when it is shown in other countries as well. Why do you ask?
So translating from an Earthly parallax second to a Far Far Away Galactic standard parallax second also took place. Stop feigning being so thick.
I know you think what you just said makes sense, but it doesn’t.
Maybe the same but Coruscant?
“Eagles can’t fly us to Mt. Doom because of a magic curse or some shit”- Gandalf to the council in Lord of the Rings
I think that one’s pretty well explained (albeit not explicitly) by the presence of the Nazgul and the eye of Sauron, which were either destroyed or otherwise occupied when the eagles made their rescue. People pretend Mordor had no airborne defenses for the bit, but it doesn’t really make sense
Mordor probably had some javelins too.
The Eye was proven to not be all-seeing or all-knowing. Same with the Ring Wraiths. And Orcs were shown numerous times to be inept guards.
So have an eagle fly Frodo to Mt. Doom on a night with a new moon, above the clouds. There is no way they would be spotted. A curse, while stupid, is the only explanation that really puts this plot hole to rest IMO.
Doesn’t have to be all seeing to spot a fucking eagle lol. This is akin to “Gandalf should’ve teleported the ring to Mordor, it never explicitly said he couldn’t”
I saw something maybe yesterday that was like, Samwise could carry frodo without being affected by the ring, so why didn’t they just tape the ring to a small animal and put it in a bag, and carry the bag to Mordor?
I’ll tell you that council didn’t think very hard before concluding “one of us must physically carry it all the way there.”
That only applies to the movie, and anyway it’s easily explained by the The Ring not wanting to switch to Sam in that moment. In the book Sam totally puts on the ring to trick some orcs and it tries to tempt him with the power of gardening really well.
The Ring would reach out and influence people around the bag. The Ring would tempt whichever eagle carried Frodo. It had to be a being that had enough control to keep hold of The Ring but not enough ambition to be controlled by it. And even then IIRC it wasn’t actually possible to destroy it willingly, Eru Ilúvatar stepped in and gave Gollum a tiny nudge off the cliff.
That tactic might actually work on me. Imagine being that good at gardening, it would be amazing.
I mean… Why didn’t he? 🤔
The best explanation would be the actual one - they don’t give a shit about Middle-Earth.
This is exactly right. They were just busy with important eagle business.
In the books it’s explained that the eagles were involved in a war of their own during the first two books and couldn’t send help without risking their own destruction. There’s actually a part in the books where frodo is like “why didn’t the eagles just fly us” lol.
The Martian when the main airlock blows up.
He ends up taping a plastic sheet over the hole with what I assume is super strong space tape and plastic and then continues to live in the station for 550 more days.
We spend the first half of the movie learning how unforgiving the environment is, and how delicate his ecosystem for life is, but you can also blow half the place up and just tape some plastic over the hole.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book, but the movie literally went “just tape that bitch up with plastic, then we’ll throw a wind storm at it to prove it’s good forever”
Another big plot hole in the Martian, also present in the book, is that messages are encoded in hexadecimal. But then why did he have a separate question mark card, when all punctuation can be encoded in ASCII/hex? Also
both him andNASA wrote in all caps. Again they have a full ascii set. Makes no sense.I found this post hilarious.
The question card is where he writes. He calls it that because that’s where he writes questions.
They also don’t encode spaces when they talk to him I always assume that was to save time. They only have about 8 hours a day and they can only send one message every 30 minutes or so. If they take too long to send a message they’ll cut into the next message and they need to give him time to go back inside.
Ah so it’s a position where they can read his messages. They does make more sense. However all caps still doesn’t. The messages should have used caps to delineate abbreviated words. Like their first message “HOW ALIVE?” Could have been HwAliv? Which of course could be interpreted as “how are you even alive?” Or “how alive are you?”
The other thing of course is that he just wrote it in all caps because they are simple straight lines. In the book it’s explained that the only way he can keep track of what they’re writing is to draw it in the dirt with a metal rod. Because all the ink in the pens boils off if he takes them out into Mars’s atmosphere and the laptops also break because the liquid in the LCD boils off.
That is also why they need to give him time to go back inside to write the next question. He can’t use the pens outside.
Well then the movie makers screwed up when they showed the hexadecimal ASCII lookups, because it’s all upper case.
At least they threw the wind storm at it, LOL.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book
How did the book handle it?
So, in the book:
When he’s making water out of hydrazine from the MDV, he gets the process a little wrong and accidentally causes an explosion. This slightly stresses the canvas around one of the three airlocks. He prefers to use that airlock to the other two because it’s the closest to the rover chargers, so he uses that one the most. Every time he cycles the airlock, it slightly expands and contracts, repeatedly stressing the canvas until it fails.
The resulting explosion hurls the airlock over 100 meters from the HAB, cracks the airlock and in the resulting tumble he bashes in his EVA suit’s helmet. So he fixes the crack with duct tape, cuts his space suit’s arm off, uses the resin from a patch kit to glue the arm material over the broken helmet (in the movie the helmet is kind of cracked and he tapes over it) so he has to go into the wrecked HAB, get one of the other space suits, change in one of the rovers, then fix the HAB.
It is established that the mission was designed to survive a HAB breach, and was supplied with spare canvas and adhesive resin to make repairs, which he did. He had to reduce the height of the ceiling in that section of the HAB to make it fit, and from then on he alternated use of the other two airlocks.
The book kicked a lot more of the shit out of Watney. The movie doesn’t even mention killing Pathfinder, the dust storm enroute to the MAV or rolling the rover over.
That’s a great write-up response, thanks!
Space age hyper-tough epoxy.
IIRC, the same canvas material the rest of the habitation was made out of.
I believe that is correct.
In the book, they also took pains to point out the steps he took to try to avoid it happening to the other airlocks after that point too - by actually balancing out their usage a bit more, instead of just always using the same one.
Removed by mod
It’s a delusion that including that link on your posts carries additional power of copyright on the content of the post under the terms of the linked license and will somehow stop any commercial entity from harvesting that data.
Removed by mod
Strong aging Facebook user vibes from that kind of tag on all their posts.
Dear astroturfers, are we going to do this each and every day?
People calling you out for being wrong isn’t astroturfing. It’s not an anti-AI licence and by definition does not restrict use (including AI-related) more than standard automatic copyright.
People calling you out for being wrong isn’t astroturfing.
There’s been plenty of astroturfing going on in the last week. Not all comments are, but some are, and they have been repeating daily (can almost set a watch to it). In fact, they’ve been kind of sloppy and over the top in some cases. Didn’t think a Creative Commons license would trigger some astroturfer so badly, but apparently they really fear people using a license with their content/comments.
And as far as calling me out, constantly doing so over and over again, repeating the same points endlessly, is not something that is just ‘calling me out for being wrong’, that’s harassment/bullying. I’ve heard/talked to the people who disagree with me, so there’s no reason for them to repeat themselves to me endlessly and following me around from community to community, on a daily basis. Especially when by them following me they derail conversations in posts I’ve commented on (unless you want to explain to me how using a Creative Commons license is related to “What plot holes could be adequately explained away with a single shot or line of dialogue?”).
The place to discuss this issue is here: https://lemmy.world/post/14942506
It’s not an anti-AI licence and by definition does not restrict use (including AI-related) more than standard automatic copyright.
It talks about non vs commercial usage right in the license, so you are incorrect (and I’m betting not a lawyer also). Also, I got that name from someone else who also uses the license, so at least one other person agrees with me. Finally, it has restrictions in it that are not mentioned in the standard automatic copyright.
Besides all that, WTF is it to you? What business of this is yours? Are you some kind of ‘commercial’ police making sure commercialism is not slandered or something? Its a weird thing to get hung up on, let alone try to abolish/remove.
Removed by mod
Most Lemmy instances don’t have any sort of licensing grant in their terms of service. So that means that the original author maintains all ownership of their work.
So technically what these people are doing is granting a license to their comment that allows it to be used for more than would otherwise be allowed by the default copyright protections.
This is accurate under American copyright law. Usually the reason you don’t maintain copyright on internet posts is because the site you’re posting on reserves the copyright for itself. Not on most Lemmy instances, though.
Those old Facebook posts with similar language were stupid. Users already gave away the license to Facebook. Cannot give away what you do not have.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/10800658
I guess you’re going to create one of those special licenses of yours for ProPublica as well. You better let them know that that license doesn’t do anything for them either. /s
It’s like watching sovereign citizens write Void Without Prejudice on parking tickets and think it has any kind of validity. The law does not work on magic words it works on contracts.
The only explanation for the wind storm and the tape is that the atmosphere had already been teraformed to be much much thicker, to the point that its at a survivable pressure for breathing, the only problem is lack of oxygen and too cold.
Isn’t there something like the gravity on Mars is so low that even though there are massive dust storms with fast winds, they feel like a gentle breeze, and would never be able to topple a solid object, let alone a space ship.
Yeah, but it’s air pressure, not gravity.
Yeah the author addressed that. He said he needed a way for the main character to be isolated and presumed dead for the story to work and really couldn’t come up with anything so he had to kind of abandon reality for a bit.
There was actually a community back on Reddit dedicated to fixing that bit of the story.
Kinda the inverse of your question (or an example of this being done poorly) but in the latest or (second to latest) star wars, after being accused of recycling the old trilogy plot over again, the writers attempted to deflect away from the obvious similarities to Hoth by having one of the characters taste what appeared to be snow on a frigid planet resembling Hoth by exclaiming “It’s salt”
“They fly now” is a similarly atrocious example given that they’ve been flying for decades, just not in any of the main trilogy movies yet.
They fly now??
As a dedicated TLJ fan, I recuse myself.
Christopher Reeve Superman. How come he’s fast enough to go back in time, but not fast enough to save Lois in the first place?
Scene needed is Jor-El explaining that Clark is as strong as he believes himself to be. He can literally focus the entire power of the Sun if he’s strong enough.
Do you think he was flying around the earth for kicks? No, he was using a gravitational slingshot to build speed. Granted, they could have explained it better, so I guess a line like “we need to use the turn of the world to speed up our satilites, and we still can’t match his velocity. Imagine how fast he’d be.” But less clunky, of course.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
That’s not how gravity assist works. You need relative differences in speed.
Someone once explained it that watching the earth spin backward was not him flying so fast that he literally dragged the Earth in reverse but rather that the Earth spinning backward was a byproduct of our third party view watching time go in reverse because Superman was traveling back in time.
But he would have to literally be stronger than the sun to do that because the only way you can travel backwards in time is to travel faster than the speed of light.
But it’s movie magic so what can you say?
Honestly my head canon is that just like how humans on a hell of an adrenaline rush can do superhuman feats like lift a car for someone trapped under it, superman has basically the equivalent, breaking his known limitations through sheer force of adrenaline.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
I like that idea.
In a similar vein, Supes could be much weaker if he were asleep or distracted. In the current iteration, if Clark Kent gets hit in the head by a ninja the weapon breaks; in the new one, he can be knocked out if he isn’t pumped up. Sort of like how Houdini was killed when he told a fan they could hit him as hard as they wanted; he meant after he’d had a moment to prepare.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
That one really annoyed me because like the next episode they were saying he needed to go mach 3 which was faster than ever! And I was like… Is time travel less than mach 3? I’m pretty sure have jets that can go Mach 3…
Yeaaah CW Flash was really inconsistent with its power curves and growth.
“Oh man, look how far down the track the T-Rex pushed our car!”
Pirates of the Caribbean it was pointed out Bootstap was strapped to a cannon and dropped into the sea but the logical conclusion that by lifting the curse Will had to kill his own father was never a plot point. not exactly a plot hole just a missed opportunity.
By that point he had joined the Flying Dutchman’s crew and thus did not die when the curse was lifted. But Will didn’t know this, so your point stands.
…and it was all a dream.
How did Inigo know the Man in Black was in love with Buttercup? It’s an easy one to fix, because there are several points where Grandpa skips parts of the story, but it could have been a single throwaway line.
This is only a plot hole because you forgot part of the movie.
Inigo’s quest is to kill the six fingered man. He saves the man in black only to get his help towards this goal. ~~But, there is exactly the kind of explanation line in the movie by Fezzik, who has not been in a drunken stupor for a month and has in fact gotten a job working closely with the castle’s security forces, explaining his insight on the topic. Fezzik has this line, interrupting Inigo talking about how he needs the skills of the Man in Black to execute his revenge:
“the rumors are that he was the Princess’ true love”. ~~
That bit was in the book and the script, but the line as filmed in the movie was paraphrased by Inigo and not uttered by Fezzik. Doesn’t really matter to the plot anyway though because Inigo sought the man in black to help plot his revenge because the man in black had defeated Vizzini. A confusing line because we were never explicitly shown how Inigo learned about the man in black’s true love of Buttercup, but not exactly a plot hole.
Excuse you, friend, I didn’t forget shit. The line is in the script, and the conversation is in the book, but it didn’t make it into the movie. Many of Andre’s lines were cut or voiceover because he had trouble being understood. It’s actually a good example of this, because it clearly was an important line to the plot that was cut because it didn’t seem important.
The line does appear in the film, though on review it does appear that Inigo takes the line from Frezik. Probably that was because Andre the giant didn’t actually speak English very well. Forgive my confusion, since I’d more recently read the book than watched the movie and the scene in question is only changed slightly. So in point of fact, it was still a throwaway line and it was still in the movie.
Never the less, Inigo was seeking the Man in Black to aid his own revenge, not because of Wesley’s true love for Buttercup, so where and when he learned of the man in black’s love for Buttercup is mostly irrelevant to the plot. Moreover, Wesley declares “True Love” to Max before Inigo says anything about love to Max.
This is all especially amusing, since we are debating a single line in a movie, based on a book, that is itself a self declared abridged version of another book.
You’re definitely confused, and it’s definitely a plot hole created by cutting out Andre’s line. Fezzik dunks Inigo’s head in the barrels of water, and then Inigo says he needs Vizzini to plan an attack on the six fingered man. “But Vizzini is dead” says Fezzik. And Inigo decides that the Man in Black must have bested Vizzini in smarts, and so he could help them plan revenge. End scene.
Later we see the Man in Black being tortured, and Humperdinck turns the machine all the way up to 11, and the whole kingdom hears him scream. We see Buttercup hears it, and then Inigo and Fezzik walking through a crowd. Inigo recognizes it as the sound his heart made when Rugen killed his father. He deduces that it must be the Man in Black because his true love marries another tonight. Fezzik appears to be surprised by all of this.
There are plenty of ways a throwaway line could hae filled the gap, and it was in th script and in the book. But in the movie, it’s a plot hole.
Also fun fact, there is no “unabridged version” of the book, and S Morgenstern doesn’t exist. That was part of the conceit for the book. All the stuff about looking for the original and finding it too boring to reprint, that’s part of the story. All of the details in the book about Goldman himself are also fictional. Goldman also references additional chapters and a sequel that his publisher has, but cannot publish due to legal complications with the Morgenstern estate.
I love everything about the movie, the book, the author, and the cast.
Yes, that’s basically what I said. I know there is no unabridged version of the book, because I’m not a dunce. That was the joke, but you’re so worried about being right and getting the last word you missed it.
I’ve seen the movie damn near a thousand times. I’ve read the book (didn’t I already make this clear). We’re both fans.
It’s not a plot hole. It’s a single stepped on line that does not matter to the plot and major motivations of the characters.
It’s not a stepped on line. The line isn’t in the movie. Watch it again.
I did a rewatch after your first comment. The line is there. Inigo says it, when Fezzik should have. But, you were right in that it doesn’t make sense for Inigo to say it because we were never shown when he learned of Wesley’s love of Buttercup. But Inigo wasn’t looking for the Man in Black to assist true love, he just wanted whomever bested Vizzini to help in his revenge plot.
“The red fabric attracts phaser fire and other dangers”
Okay, yes, well, good, but why the fuck would Starfleet make their uniforms out of danger enhancing materials? That is like some 4D chess fucking eugenics program going on here.
Anyone stupid enough to wear the uniform deserves to get shot. They obviously fixed the problem by TNG so command were able to flex a little bit.
To keep the important people from getting shot. Same reason batman makes robin wear a flashy costume.
